Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.
AN: Sorry it's taken this long, but it's been hard to find a spare moment alone at my place lately. Thank you and thank you again to everyone who reviewed – if it hadn't been for you, the story would probably have ended at chapter one.
Three.
A cool waft of air as Tinkerbell flits in. A low click as she shuts the window behind her.
"She's drunk," Peter says softly, not knowing quite what else to say. Tinkerbell just nods. She knows. Hasn't she watched Wendy long enough to know?
For a long moment, they are just looking at Wendy, looking and saying nothing. Then Tinkerbell flies over to the bed, and stands on the pillow. She looks down at Wendy's closed eyes as if she can see right through them, right into her dreams. She looks sombre, terribly serious.
"Can you help?" he asks quietly. She looks up and shrugs, jingling softly. Would you like to see?
"How?" But he is already moving, settling himself carefully on the bed bedside Wendy. The silk coverlet is cold. Tinkerbell is incongruous in this setting, only herself, the same as ever, when everything else has changed.
Wendy does not stir or wake. Tinkerbell says, Look.
And suddenly there it is, as clear as the room about him and as immediate – disjointed flashes of memory, half-remembered words and snatches of music that compose Wendy's drunken dream. She dreams she's awake and sitting on the windowsill, and he's saying come away, come away. And she dreams of cold bright stars. But this is confusing and incoherent and loud.
Peter goes lower, seeing a long grey hall; featureless doors shut tight, some almost hidden behind piles and piles of pearls. Every single pearl, he understands without knowing how he knows, is an unkind word, a sharp tone, or a loved one disappointed, layered and layered over and again with guilt. Layered with gilt and guilt; they are of impossible size. She's drowning in them, drowning herself in sticky sweet medicine for them.
Behind one door, which opens barely a crack, he sees white pinafores and black wool stockings and puddings in the nursery, a red-haired toddler that must be her youngest brother – but all this is filtered grey; there's no feeling here at all. Through the keyhole of another featureless door there is an older John in khaki clothes, rain sleeting down all around him that cannot have been there, because John is standing inside. Peter watches the rain for a long moment, grey chilling rain.
Voices coming as if through water behind another door, this one locked and bolted. He can hear his own voice and hers, the ones he remembers.
In the bedroom, Peter stares unseeing at the wall. He is distantly aware of Tinkerbell watching him, and of his own hands that have somehow gone without his conscious will to hold on to Wendy. Is this her mind? Is this where she lives?
He walks without walking down the corridors, listening for the sound of steel on steel or children's laughter or even Captain Hook, because that at least he is sure would have colour. Here though, there are only bloodless scenes. Quiet hours alone in a quiet room. The sound of a clock ticking – and here he hears a whisper of Wendy's voice – ticking away the seconds of my life.
Wendy in a grey skirt, white blouse, black cardigan – this mechanical mourning. A book open in her lap, unread. Her eyes are closed and in her thoughts he catches a familiar phrase, quoted and quoted until the words themselves have lost all meaning and only the desolation of them remains.
"No bells," she is thinking tiredly, "no tears. This is the end of the world."
What are you looking for? Tinkerbell asks, and suddenly he sees her reflected in Wendy's mirror. Her own light, and the low light of Wendy's lamps. For a minute he does not know, and then he says without willing it, "Light . . . light. A happy thought."
Her small face in the mirror. Tonight Tinkerbell feels only compassion for them both.
Here, she says, and here he is before another of these doors, but through this keyhole a shaft of sunlight is shining. Sunlight shining through into this grey hall, grasped at gratefully. The door is unlocked so he opens it, and here with the warmth of the light almost tangible about him . . . here for a moment he thinks what he is seeing is beautiful.
This is Wendy's last happy thought - a sunlit river bordered by long grass and flowers; flowers strewn in the cool green-brown water, tangling in her long brown hair. Her white waterlogged nightgown clinging to her. Blue of the sky in her luminous eyes, golden light dappling her as she drifts. Riverwater lapping about her - over her rose-pink lips, her pale face, her serene unblinking eyes. Water and flowers and light, the things she loved.
Loved, because in Wendy's happy ending, she is dead.
Peter stands there, listening to birdsong somewhere above him.
It's so peaceful here.
Down in the stream, she looks peaceful. As peaceful as she looked sleeping so many years ago. It feels like a hundred years since then. It feels like a thousand, the girl drifting there forever. Don't touch her, Tinkerbell warns, and he's holding on to her there in the place that must be real, but right here he can't stand to leave her in the water.
She's happy, Tinkerbell says, and he says "She's dead," and he can hear his own voice against the birdsong and the quiet sound of the river. Wendy, which is just a word now that means love and forever and always and mine, Wendy is dead in the river, and she's so lovely there.
"Tinkerbell, I wish - " he begins, looking down at her there and the distant sense of her under his hands, Tinkerbell shaking her head and saying Don't, don't . . .
"Tinkerbell I wish," he says again, and without letting himself think about what he is doing Peter steps through the door.
There is a crack like the end of the world, and a rushing howling and the bedroom with its lamps and window fades away around him and the door behind him disappears and is gone, and then Peter is really there, there by the stream and Wendy's eyes widen and she gasps for air, and he's running running down there and into the water.
Choking and frightened as he reaches her in the cool and shallow stream, she clings to him. "Wendy," he's saying to her, "Here you are, you're here, keep breathing," and she coughs and breathes and her long wet hair trails in the water.
"Why," she says, or maybe "What," and she breathes and shudders again and she's cool from the river, a thousand years in the river. Her soaking nightgown and the river around them, flowers still caught in the tangle of her hair.
He carries her, unprotesting, up onto the bank. Lays her down among the summer flowers and the warm green grass. She looks beyond him, up at the sky, sky blue eyes - just breathing.
"Wendy," he says again, but Wendy looks as though she is finished, as though it is over. It's too late.
This isn't how it ends, he thinks desperately. But then, with a sudden stillness, he knows.
How they all end.
Gentle sound of the river and the birds about them. Sunlight shining down on Wendy, lying unmoving among the flowers. And so, because this is how they all end, because this is the answer to all the questions, Peter leans down very carefully and kisses her. Just lightly, just gently, nothing more really than the touch of her mouth, but it's enough. He loves her, and because of this it is enough. Just feeling her breathe, and the air around them heavy with the fragrance of the crushed flowers.
And when he raises himself a little, and looks down at her, she is looking at him.
Right at him, right into him, and her blue eyes are full now of water that is not from the river. "You're not dead," she says, like a child woken from a nightmare. It sounds like a question, so he says, "No."
It's her voice, Wendy's own familiar voice. "Am I dead?" she asks now, petals in her long hair and the sun drying droplets of the river off her, and she, the princess of all the stories, looking at him as though he is the only person in the world.
"No," Peter says again, but something in her face seems to need more. He says, knowing he is right, "You're not dead. This is all real; it's Neverland. You're home."
And then, incredibly, she is crying. Crying and crying, that cold-voiced woman who drowned herself every night is crying and crying beneath him in the flowers. And her cool arms have come up around him and suddenly she is holding him as tightly as he is holding her, and suddenly she is entirely a warm, living girl.
For a long time, all she does is cry.
And this may have been a good place to end the story, Peter thinks, something to think of as the end. But this is a happy ending, and happy endings, as Peter understands them – as Neverland understands them – never end in tears.
Wendy knows about endings. So there by that river, when she is finally still again, she looks up again and says, "Peter," and kisses him. Sweet like that, on the bank of that river; the birds singing, and the sunlit flowers, and the taste of tears still on her lips.
And this is enough.
Wendy and Peter Pan are home, and because of this it will always be enough.